The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
From time to time, the software running in packet switching devices needs to be upgraded or rebooted. However, this is problematic as rebooting a packet switching device to a same or upgraded version can take a long time during which time the packet switching device is unavailable to switch packets. This rebooting of a packet switching device impacts service provider business by reducing the availability of their networks, thereby affecting the Service Level Agreements with their customers.